The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb
west London, was bedlam as Andersson narrowly beat Wooderson. ‘If there was a moment when things began, that was it for me,’ Bannister later said. In a foot race, unlike other sports, greatness could be won with sheer heart. He sensed he had plenty of that.
Before he even unpacked his bags at Oxford, Bannister sought out athletes at the track. He found no one there, but discovered a notice on a college bulletin board for the University Athletic Club. He promptly mailed a guinea to join but received no response. He decided to go running on the track anyway, even though one of the groundskeepers advised, ‘I’m afraid that you’ll never be any good. You just haven’t got the strength or the build for it.’ Apparently the groundskeeper thought everyone needed to look like Jack Lovelock, the famous Oxford miler: short, compact, with thick, powerful legs. The long-limbed, almost ungainly Bannister persisted nonetheless. Three weeks later, having finally received his membership card, he entered the Freshman’s Sport mile wearing an oil-spotted jersey from his rowing days. He thought it best to lead from the start – a strategy he would afterwards discard – and finished the race in second place with a time of 4:52. After the race, the secretary of the British Olympic Association advised him, ‘Stop bouncing, and you’ll knock twenty seconds off.’ Bannister had never before worn running spikes, and their grip on the track had made him, as he later described, ‘over-stride in a series of kangaroo-like bounds’.
The cruel winter of 1946–7, with its ten-foot snowdrifts, meant that someone had to shovel out a path on the track so the athletes could train; Bannister took to the yeoman’s task, and for his effort won a third-string spot in the Oxford versus Cambridge mile race on 22 March 1947. On that dreary spring day, on the very track at White City where he had watched Wooderson compete, Bannister discovered his true gift for running. He stepped up to the mark feeling the pressure to run well against his university’s arch rival. From the start Bannister held back, letting the others set the pace. The track was wet, and the front of his singlet was spotted black with cinder ash kicked up by the runners ahead of him. After the bell for the final lap, Bannister was exhausted but still close enough to the leaders to finish respectably. All of a sudden, though, he was overwhelmed by a feeling that he just had to win. It was instinct, a ‘crazy desire to overtake the whole field’, as he later explained. Through a cold, high wind on the back straight, he increased the tempo of his stride, and to everyone’s shock, team-mates and competitors alike, he surged past on the outside. In the effort inspired by the confluence of body and will, he felt more alive than ever before. He pushed through the tape twenty yards ahead of the others in 4:30.8. It wasn’t the time that mattered, rather the rush of passing the field with his long, devouring stride. This was ecstasy, and it was the first time Bannister knew for sure there was something remarkable in the way he ran – and something remarkable in the feeling that went with it.
After the race he met Jack Lovelock, the gold medallist in the 1,500m at the 1936 Olympics and the former world record holder in the mile. ‘You mean the Jack Lovelock,’ Bannister said on being introduced. Lovelock was a national hero, Exeter graduate, doctor, and blessed with tremendous speed. It didn’t take much insight on his part to see in Bannister the potential resurrection of British athletics.
Bannister didn’t disappoint. On 5 June he clocked a 4:24.6 mile, beating the time set by his hero Wooderson when he was the same age, 18. In the summer Bannister travelled with the English team on its first post-war international tour, putting in several good runs. In November he was selected as a ‘possible’ for the 1948 Olympics, then turned down the invitation. He wasn’t ready, he decided, to some criticism.
It was in his nature to listen to his own counsel, not that of others. He had taken a coach, Bill Thomas, who had once trained Lovelock, but Bannister soon became disgruntled with him. Thomas attended to Bannister on the track while wearing a bowler hat, suit and waistcoat. He barked instructions at the miler on how to hold his arms or how many laps to run during training. When the young miler asked for the reasoning behind the lessons, Thomas simply replied, ‘Well, you do this because I’m the coach and I tell you.’ When Bannister ran a trial and enquired about his time, Thomas said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Soon Bannister dropped him, preferring to discover for himself how to improve his performances.
The next year he became Oxford Athletic Club secretary, then quickly its president. He won the Oxford versus Cambridge meet for the second year; he competed in the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) championships in the summer, learning the ropes of first-class competition. Increasingly the newspapers headlined his name. He even saved the day at the opening ceremony for the Olympics when it was discovered that the British team hadn’t been given a flag with which to march into the stadium. Bannister found the back-up flag, smashing the window of the commandant’s car with a brick to retrieve it.
Four years later, he intended to save the British team’s honour again.
Roger Bannister’s preparations for the Helsinki Games began in the autumn of 1950. He had spent the two previous years studying medicine, soaking up university life, hitch-hiking from Paris to Italy, and going on running tours to America, Greece, and Finland. His body filled out. He won some races and lost others but, importantly, he turned himself from an inexperienced, weedy kid into a young man who clearly understood that Oxford and running had opened up worlds to him that otherwise would have remained closed. He was ready to make his Olympic bid, and afterwards to put away his racing spikes for a life devoted to medicine.
Bannister’s plan was to spend one year competing against the best international middle-distance runners in the world, learning their strengths and weaknesses and acclimatising to different environments. Then, in the year before the Games, he would focus exclusively on training to his peak, running in only a few races so as not to take off his edge. The plan was entirely his own. Having spoken to Lovelock about his preparations for the 1936 Olympics, Bannister felt he needed no other guidance.
First he flew to New Zealand over Christmas for the Centennial Games, where he beat the European 1,500m champion Willi Slijkhuis and the Australian mile champion Don Macmillan, both of whom he was likely to face in Helsinki. His mile time was down to 4:09.9, a reduction of more than forty seconds from his first Oxford race three years earlier. While in New Zealand he visited the small village school Lovelock had attended, noticing that the sapling given to the Olympic gold medal winner had now grown into an oak tree. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him. Back in England Bannister continued his fellowship in medicine through the spring of 1951 at Oxford, where he investigated the limits of human endurance and chatted with such distinguished lecturers as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He then flew to Philadelphia to compete in the Benjamin Franklin Mile, the premier American event in middle-distance running. The press fawned over this foil to the American athlete, commenting on his travelling alone to the event: ‘No manager, no trainer, no masseur, no friends! He’s nuts – or he’s good.’ In front of forty thousand American fans, Bannister crushed the country’s two best milers in a time of 4:08.3. The New York Herald Tribune described him as the ‘worthy successor to Jack Lovelock’. The New York Times quoted one track official as saying, ‘He’s young, strong and fast. There’s no telling what he can do.’
The race brought Bannister acclaim back home. To beat the Americans on their own turf earned one the status of a national hero. When he followed with summer victories at the British Games and the AAA championships, it seemed track officials and the press were ready to award him the Olympic gold medal right then and there. They praised his training as ‘exceptional’, an ‘object lesson’. Of his long, fluid stride, the British press gushed that it was ‘immaculate’ and ‘amazing’. He left rivals standing; he was a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ on the track. After a race that left the crowd laughing at how effortlessly Bannister had won, a British official predicted, ‘Anyone who beats him in the Olympics at Helsinki will have to fly.’
Then the positive press turned quickly to the negative. Following his own plan, Bannister stopped running mile races at summer’s end. Tired from competition, he felt he had learned all he needed during the year and should now dedicate himself to training. When he chose to run the half-mile in an international meet, the papers attacked: ‘Go Back to Your Own Distance, Roger’. This was only the beginning of the criticism, but Bannister remained focused on his goal.
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